When Unity still was being developed and ready for testing on Ubuntu 10.10 i gave it a try and didn’t like what i saw. Now after two days of testing the Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 3 i must say it looks good but i still don’t like it.
Some of the reasons are the limited options of adding shortcuts to the left panel and not being able to add anything to the top panel. Another thing is that i’m not a big fan of the way the menu’s work. To start an application you can click on the applications icon and then you’ll see a short list of installed applications (6 applications to be exact) and if the application is not listed you can click on a small arrow that will show you a full list of installed applications (uncategorized). But this list is longer then the menu itself so to get a good view on the list you can click on a small icon in the right bottom corner to get a full screen list. You can also do a search for applications or you can click on the arrow on the right side of All Applications and you’ll get a drop down menu that shows you a categorized list. When you selected a category you will get the same “problem”.. a list of 6 applications and if the application that you’re looking for is not listed you can click on the show more arrow to get the full list off installed applications. You can either scroll down to find the application or click on the icon to get a full screen view of the category.
Another thing that i miss are the kinky desktop effects when minimizing/maximizing or opening/closing a window and of course the wobbly window effect and the desktop cube stuff. Like i said in the beginning of this article… it looks good. But in my opinion it’s not as functional as it looks and/or as i’m used to. But unity is no reason for me to drop Ubuntu and switch to another linux based distro. I’ll just swap to the Ubuntu Classic Desktop and leave unity for what is. What i wanted to see was that the Ubuntu Classic Desktop was the default desktop at login and for those who want to use unity that they could change the session at the login screen. I understand that changing things every now and then is needed but to be honest this is a bit of a disappointing change.
I hope that the final release of Natty doesn’t have the two log-out menus (left and right) the way it does now in Classic Desktop, because I doubt very, very highly that I’ll ever use Unity and this redundancy is annoying.
It took me some time to find what you mean with the logout menu on the left side.. i didn’t notice it until you brought it up….
Not sure why or what the reason is why they added the extra menu on the right side but i hope they will leave it like it is.. one the right side of the top panel. Makes more sense and it looks better.
I love unity!
And I’m happy that each distributions have their own enviorment 😀
Ubuntu – Unity
Kubuntu – KDE
Fedora – Gnome Shell
Linux Mint – Gnome 3
For all said about both Unity and ‘Not-the-Unity” Ubuntu Classic, did you did or did you didn’t find anything better in Ubuntu Classic?
I found no speed improvements
I found some things no longer working
I found the install process the worst one in my 40+ years with computers (19 floppies in Windows made more sense)
Your opinion?
Well my opinion is the same as in the article.. i don’t like Unity 🙂
I noticed that Unity is a bit slower then the classic version. When using unity stuff like desktop effects won’t work and it’s almost impossible to change the way the desktop looks. And the installation process looks good but it i had some bugs and problems. Upgrading from 10.10 to 11.04 gut stuck on some mysql process and now it doesn’t want to boot at all…. need i say more?